Bike Specific Tools

In my previous post I rambled on about wrenches. There are many special tools that you may still need to perform specific repairs, like straightening a wheel or replacing a chainring. I'll discuss the more common bike tools here. Let's start with cone wrenches:

If you want to service your hub bearings you will need cone wrenches. These are thin wrenches designed to fit on the flat sides of the bearing cone. First you slide the cone wrench on the cone to hold it steady:

Next you unscrew the locknut with a regular wrench or an adjustable:

With the locknut out of the way you can service the hub (here's the full tutorial). Front hubs usually have 13mm cones, while rears have 15mm cones.

The next bike tool I'd like to show are spoke wrenches. You use these to turn the spoke nipples, and thus adjust the tension on the spokes:

There are 3 common sizes - 3.2mm (black), 3.3mm (green), and 3.5mm (red). If you do lots of work on different bike wheels then you'll need all 3 wrenches. The idea is to use the tightest fitting spoke wrench, and press it onto the spoke nipple as you turn it to avoid rounding off the nipple (which is unfortunately easy to do since they're made of soft brass).

Here is a simple bike tool used to remove chainring bolts:

It's very simple, and it's only purpose is to hold the nut in place as you unscrew the chainring bolt with an Allen key:

Now here is one of my crank removal tools (middle piece):

This tool threads into the crank after you've removed the crank bolt, and then pulls the crank off an Octalink, Isis, or square tapered spindle. First you screw the base of the tool all the way into the crank, with the inner piece fully unscrewed:

Then you tighten the inner piece until the crank slides off:

That's really all there is to it, and I wrote another tutorial about removing cranks here.

The rear gear clusters on derailleur equipped bikes need special tools to remove as well. There are two varieties, freewheels and cassettes. Each type use a different set of tools. First, here is a freewheel tool next to some freewheels:

A freewheel tool should fit the specific freewheel that you want to remove, and there are many different types. To use the tool, slide it into the freewheel's splines and unscrew it with a big fun wrench:

 

I posted more detailed information about freewheels here. The other type of gear cluster is the cassette, which requires both a lockring tool and a chain whip to remove:

To tell these apart, count the number of teeth on the smallest cog. If there are 12 teeth or less then it isn't a freewheel. Also look for a flat lockring in front, with splines for the tool to fit in. Anyway, to use the cassette tools you need to brace the cassette with the chain whip and insert the lockring tool into the splines:

Put a wrench on the cassette tool and press down on both the wrench and the chain whip to unscrew the lockring.

There are two more tools I'd like to show - the bottom bracket tool and the chain tool:

The bottom bracket tool looks like an oversized freewheel remover, and works the same way. You would use it to unscrew a cartridge bottom bracket from the bike frame (full tutorial here).

The chain tool is used to disconnect/reconnect a bike chain. There is a small pin that pushes a rivet through the chain link so that you can remove the chain from the bike. I made a more thorough post about it here.

There are definitely more bike specific tools out there, but these are some of the basic ones that most bikes tend to use. Many of them can be the difference between a quick and simple repair, and a nightmarish day-long ordeal. These tools are really cheap too, and the frustration they save you is well worth the initial cost.